


Domesticity

by Emma_Oz



Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Domestic, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-19
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 06:11:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2641061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emma_Oz/pseuds/Emma_Oz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I imagine that Bertie, an orphan with horrifying aunts, might appreciate the way Jeeves makes a home for him. </p><p>Chibideath has generously set no parameters for this story, other than that it include both Jeeves and Bertie.  I’ve written mild slash, which I hope is alright.</p><p>Thanks to Special_Trille for betaing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Course One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chibideath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chibideath/gifts).



I put the phone down and turned to Jeeves with a glad heart and a cheerful mien. ‘You’ll never guess who will be in town next week,’ I said.

‘I venture to guess that Mr Biffen may be down from Hertfordshire.’

I goggled briefly, and then recalled that Charles Edward ‘Biffy’ Biffen had married Jeeves’ niece Mabel, and that no doubt she had mentioned the impending visit to her mother, who had passed it on to Jeeves. Jeeves may appear supernatural, but he isn’t, not quite.

‘Just so,’ I replied, ‘And he is bringing young Mabel with him. We’ll join them for dinner at the Ritz next Wednesday.’

‘I’ll prepare the grey silk for your meal,’ Jeeves said.

‘We’ll meet them at eight,’ I responded.

There was a little more of this ‘you’ and ‘we’ back and forth before I realised that Jeeves did not intend to join us. Indeed he seemed quite shocked that I anticipated that he might want to dine with his niece. 

I couldn’t see why. Mabel is as sound a pippin as I know. Beautiful, of course – I’d first glimpsed her in a Palace of Beauty where particularly stunning girls are posed in glass tanks. Even in a tank she was a knock out. In person, even better.

Beautiful, but also brainy in that special way that Jeeveses are. It is particularly lucky that she has about twice the average amount of brains, as Biffy is so thick he makes me look bright. And that’s saying something.

Jeeves corrected my misapprehension and explained that it was not that he did not want to see young Mabel; it was that he did not want to see her while in my company. 

‘Dash it,’ I responded, ‘I know you are filled to the brim with feudal spirit, but cutting off your niece is a bit much.’

‘While warmly congratulating my niece on a happy marriage to an attentive young man,’ Jeeves said severely, ‘the liaison has opened a grey area of potential social awkwardness.’

‘You mean that Mabel has risen in the world and can’t be seen dining with her relations in service?’ I asked incredulously.

‘I mean that I can not be seen dining with my employer,’ Jeeves said firmly. I knew that tone. It meant that Jeeves would not be moved.

 

Jeeves may not be moved, but he may sometimes be melted. In the following days I implored him to find a solution to this puzzler, fraught with grey areas of potential social awkwardness. 

I didn’t see the issue myself, but Jeeves is a stickler for maintaining the social order (which means that we aristocrats loll about while he arranges everything exactly the way he wants it behind the scenes). Nonetheless, Jeeves thought this was a dangerous precedent, likely to lead to Jack thinking he was as good as his master, weakening the country’s moral fibre, and possibly leading to the downfall of the Empire. 

But my constant entreaties finally lead to Jeeves finding a way.

He put his simple plan to me in the dining room where he had laid a toothsome meal for one on the polished mahogany. He proposed to sidestep the problem of undermining the social order by dining at the Ritz ensemble by entertaining Biffy and Mabel at home. He concluded that what no one knew of, could not undermine the moral fibre of the country at large. 

‘Euripides!’ I cried, ‘Or eureka, or whatever it is! Well thought on, Jeeves.’

 

What with one thing – a hectic Darts competition at the Drones – and another – avoiding my pestilential cousins who had been sent down – I was almost late. I got home just in time for Jeeves to slide me into dining attire before the door chimed.

Mabel looked as pretty as ever, but I barely glimpsed her before she shot out of the lounge and off ‘to help Uncle Reggie in the kitchen’.

I poured Biffy a fruity cocktail, and then made up two more which I took through the swinging baize door which separates the two domains. Usually I regard the kitchen as Jeeves’ territory and avoid it, but I’m not sure why. It is a jolly little room, with cheerful yellow walls and full of the most distractingly delightful smells.

Jeeves and Mabel were a whirl of activity, whisking this and draining that in clouds of steam, and peeking into the oven to release even tastier smells. I don’t know how they managed not to run into each other as they danced about, especially as Jeeves has such broad shoulders. Biffy and I retreated to seating behind the small kitchen table.

Before I knew it Mabel had placed a white tablecloth over it and dropped a kiss on Biffy’s forehead. She and Jeeves eyeballed each other in some silent yet titanic battle of the wills. It was like watching mastodon fight with mastodon on the tundra. To my surprise, Jeeves acquiesced and suddenly we were dining together in the kitchen. 

The food was delicious, the wine plentiful and the company jolly good. Biffy is always a cheery cove, though not what you’d call a conversationalist. Having Mabel and Jeeves there made things go with more of a swing.

‘Do you see much of Montague ‘Monty’ Glover?’ I asked, ‘His place is near yours, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes,’ Biffy agreed.

‘And how is he?’ I asked.

Biffy stared at me as if I’d asked him to tell me the square root of the hypotenuse.

‘You saw him last week at the Meet,’ Mabel reminded him, ‘His Aunt is visiting.’

‘Poor soul,’ I said with a shudder.

‘Not that sort of Aunt,’ Biffy added, ‘The mad sort. She breeds ferrets.’

‘Rum,’ I responded, ‘But someone must.’

Biffy pointed out that you can use ferrets to hunt rabbits and that reminded me of some youthful excursions with the gamekeeper at Brinkley Court. It reminded Jeeves of rabbit stew and he and Mabel grew quite poetic in their descriptions of sage, onion, garlic and mushrooms.

‘That sounds awfully good,’ Biffy said, and Mabel promised to make him some.

I was in the midst of eliciting the same promise from Jeeves, when I saw Mabel lean clean across the table and offer Biffy a spoonful from her own plate.

Usually this sort of thing horrifies me. It’s one step away from a newlywed wife putting her hands over her husband’s eyes and gaily calling ‘Guess who?’ But for some reason I found it endearing. Perhaps it was the happy way Biffy tasted the morsel she had chosen. He looked like he was living on velvet.

 

The next day I couldn’t help but reflect on the corking time we’d had. Dining at the Drones is all very well if one doesn’t mind having bread thrown at one’s head before the soup course is reached. But dining with Jeeves had been so cosy. It reminded me of dinners in the nursery with Nanny. Or perhaps it was more like eating with Bingo Little and his missus. There was a domesticity to it.

I looked at the gleaming dining table laid for one and with a discontented sigh I sat down.

Then I leapt up again as Jeeves entered with the salad course. ‘Wait!’ I cried imperiously. I may even have made an imperious gesture like a Roman emperor.

I marched past Jeeves and into the kitchen. I attempted Mabel’s wheeze of throwing down a spotless linen on the kitchen table. It turns out that this is much more difficult than it appears. After an extended process of twitching it an inch this way and adjusting it two inches that way, I stood back. 

‘We will eat here,’ I said. Then I looked at Jeeves carefully, and added, ‘If that’s alright with you.’

Jeeves did not reply, but set the table for two. I poured some white, and we began to discuss the merits of the ‘25 sauvignon blanc over the ’23 semillon as if we had been dining together all our lives.

Indeed, it was only when I stretched out my fork to let Jeeves taste the melon soaked in white wine that I realised what I was doing. My hand just seemed to hang in space. I felt like twenty different types of asses. But then Jeeves took the mouthful I had offered him. He swallowed delicately. 

My eyes boggled but Jeeves returned the conversation to our forthcoming holiday on the Continent, and I was eventually able to make some kind of sensible reply. 

‘Get us a house,’ I said, ‘I’m sick of hotels. Let’s have a nice place where we can eat in.’


	2. Course Two

We settled in to an exciting new arrangement. Or at least, a new arrangement that was thoroughly unexciting but somehow deeply satisfying. Each day started with toast and tea in bed. I have no idea how Jeeves does it, but as soon as the old eyes open there he is, with an ambrosial cup of the drink that cheers but does not something or other.

Then a light lunch at the Club or a hotel with pals, before tootling back home for a lovely evening in. The fellows at the Drones have noticed that Wooster is no longer the lad about town who used to snort cocktails after midnight while doing a mad fandango. Not snorting and fandangoing at the same time of course. No, it is a happier and more home-loving Wooster who dines en garçon with Jeeves.

You’d think that Jeeves would get bored with talking to a dolt like me, but he does not appear to. He never brings up Nietzsche or Spinoza, but has a great line in gossip. He seems most interested in my whodunits and always manages to guess who the murderer is before I finish describing the plots.

My only problem was an odd one. Intimate as this was, it made me worry that Jeeves would leave me. Not that he would ever leave me, of course, but he might gently suggest that he was tired of having quite so much of my company. 

I tried to discuss the matter with Gussie Fink Nottle, but he was as hopeless as he usually is about non-newt related matters. ‘I worry about losing Jeeves,’ I told him.

‘I’m surprised he’s still with you,’ Gussie said frankly, ‘I know several fellows have offered him fabulous sums to defect to them.’

‘Jeeves would never do that!’ I said. I sighed, and realised that none of my pals at the Drones could possibly fathom my problem.

Through close observation, I sometimes felt there was something Jeeves wasn’t telling me, some matter he was mulling over in that magnificent mind of his. He would occasionally look softly and fondly into the distance before snapping back to his usual inscrutability and passing me the peas.

I wouldn’t have said a thing, if not for the freeing effect of too many whiskey and sodas on the tongue. One evening, after indulging in several of Jeeves’ specials, I reflected that it was a shame we had not begun this earlier.

‘It would have been too dangerous,’ Jeeves said. Then he looked astonished at his own words, leading me to reflect that he might also have indulged to an unaccustomed degree.

‘Surely you are not still worried about the moral fibre of the English nation?’ I cried incredulously. ‘Hang them! And hang their moral fibre!’

Jeeves coughed like a mild sheep on a distant hilltop, and I realised that he had not been entirely upfront regarding the source of his disapproval of our arrangement. ‘I meant,’ he said slowly, ‘that it would encourage an unwarranted intimacy on my part.’

I blushed. ‘Well, I would be happy. For you to have feelings of intimacy. For me. With me. For us to be intimate.’

Time seemed to stretch out, but I couldn’t stop my tongue from burbling on. ‘The feelings wouldn’t be unwarranted or unrequited, you know.’

Jeeves looked at me very carefully, an inspection that made me feel like the last dog in the pet shop window. Then his eyes crinkled as if he had decided to give the pup a good home.

With great boldness, I moved closer and put a hand lightly on his thigh. ‘Perhaps we could have something more intimate than just dinner…’ I searched for the right word.

‘Perhaps dinner and dessert?’ said Jeeves with both boldness and his unfailing sense of the mot juste. He placed his hand on mine and leant across to kiss me. 

At last I was home.

**Author's Note:**

> Note One
> 
> This fic is based on the 1925 short story ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’ in which Jeeves’ niece Mabel marries Wooster’s enormously thick and forgetful friend Charles Edward ‘Biffy’ Biffen.
> 
> Wooster first sees Mabel in a Palace of Beauty and his description is both funny and underscores his almost total disinterest in the female form.
> 
> ‘I don’t know if you know this Palace of Beauty place? It’s a sort of aquarium full of the delicately nurtured instead of fishes. You go in, and there is a kind of cage with a female goggling out at you through a sheet of plate glass. She’s dressed in some weird kind of costume, and over the cage is written ‘Helen of Troy’. You pass on to the next, and there’s another one doing jiu-jitsu with a snake. Sub-title, ‘Cleopatra’. You get the idea – Famous Women Through the Ages and all that. I can’t say it fascinated me to any great extent. I maintain that a lovely woman loses a lot of her charm if you have to stare at her in a tank. Moreover, it gave me a rummy sort of feeling of having wandered into the wrong bedroom at a country house, and I was flying past at a fair rate of speed, anxious to get it over, when Biffy suddenly went off his rocker.’
> 
> Note Two
> 
> The reference to Jeeves melting may seem out of place but we can take Jeeves’ own words for it. In ‘Bertie Changes His Mind’, the only short story narrated by Jeeves and not Wooster, Jeeves writes that he nearly changed a plan because Bertie moved him by making puppy dog eyes at him.
> 
> ‘I am fond of Mr Wooster, and I admit I came very near to melting as I looked at his face. He was staring at me in a sort of dumb despair that would have touched anybody.’
> 
> Note Three
> 
> Montague Glover (1898-1983) left a collection of letters and photographs showing his appreciation of the physique of working class men in general and of his lifelong lover (and manservant) Ralph Hall in particular. They met in 1930 and were together for over fifty years. You can see the photos and read Ralph’s letters to Monty while serving in World War II in James Gardiner’s A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover (1992).


End file.
